[erlang-questions] The future of Erlang and BEAM

[Deryk Barker]

As a mere amateur in the erlang world - I've used it a few times in my 
network programming course, probably bending the rules slightly to do so...

But I've been programming for a while (first program FORTRAN on an IBM 
7090 while still at school in 1968, second program in BASIC on a PDP-8 
while taking a course from Maurice Wilkes at Cambridge in 1970) and 
there's one aspect in all of this thread that has either not been 
mentioned or at least not made much of:

     the fact that erlang is a functional language.

For years FP got a bad press, from the early days when the accusation 
was inefficiency ("LISP programmers know the value of everything and the 
cost of nothing") to the more recent criticisms that FP is very nice for 
academics but won't work in the *real* world.

Erlang clearly blows these ideas out of the water and combines all of 
the attributes everybody else has mentioned with those of developing in 
a functional language, with all of its associated benefits, especially 
of correctness.

Besides, I think java is a terribly *ugly* language...:-)

deryk
-- 

Deryk Barker, Computer Science Dept.
Camosun College, Victoria, BC, Canada